School starts next week. My classroom is set up, my syllabus is printed, and for the first time in years, I feel genuinely clear about the technology I will and will not be using. This clarity did not come easily. It required an honest summer of auditing, learning, and making decisions that prioritize student learning over my own comfort with familiar tools.

Here is the full accounting.

What I Am Keeping

Google Workspace - now with actual expertise. I passed my Google Certified Educator Level 1 exam in late July, and I am currently working through Level 2 preparation. The certification process did exactly what I hoped: it forced me to move beyond surface-level usage of tools I had been underutilizing for years. Three specific revelations changed my practice.

First, Google Forms' quiz mode with automated feedback. I had been using Forms for exit tickets and simple surveys, but the quiz functionality - with branching logic, automatic point assignment, and individualized feedback based on response - transforms it into a genuine formative assessment engine. I can now build a diagnostic assessment that gives each student personalized feedback within seconds of submission, without my manual intervention. The hours this will save are significant, but more importantly, the speed of the feedback loop is pedagogically transformative.

Second, Google Classroom's rubric builder. I had been attaching rubrics as separate documents, which students routinely ignored. The built-in rubric feature embeds the rubric directly in the assignment, auto-calculates scores as I evaluate each criterion, and gives students a clear visual representation of where they landed. It is not revolutionary technology. It is a feature I should have been using two years ago.

Third, Google Sites as a student portfolio platform. During my summer study, I built a class website using Sites and realized its potential as a student-facing portfolio tool. This year, each student will maintain a Google Site that serves as their digital portfolio - a curated collection of their best work, reflections, and growth artifacts across the entire year. The integration with Drive means embedding documents, slides, and videos is seamless. No additional accounts. No additional logins.

Screencastify for recorded lessons. My asynchronous video lessons proved their value last year and remain a core part of my instructional strategy. I record concept explanations that students can revisit on their own schedule, which frees class time for application, practice, and the human interactions that no video can replicate.

Remind for family communication. Simple, reliable, effective. Families receive weekly updates. They do not need to download another app or create another account. It works, and I am not looking for a replacement.

What I Am Dropping

Kahoot. This will be controversial, and I want to explain my reasoning carefully. Kahoot is engaging. Students enjoy it. It generates visible enthusiasm in ways that warm a teacher's heart. But after honest reflection, I cannot identify a learning outcome that Kahoot achieves better than the alternatives already in my toolkit.

The gamification mechanic - speed-based competition with a public leaderboard - rewards quick recall rather than deep thinking. It privileges students who process rapidly and penalizes those who think carefully. The social pressure of the leaderboard creates anxiety for some students that undermines whatever cognitive benefit the activity might provide. And the time investment - creating quality Kahoots takes longer than creating equivalent Google Forms quizzes that provide richer data and more individualized feedback.

I am not arguing that Kahoot is bad. I am arguing that it does not earn its place in a toolkit that I am intentionally curating for maximum learning impact with minimum tool proliferation.

Padlet. This one is harder because I genuinely like Padlet as a tool. The interface is intuitive, the collaborative features are well-designed, and it supports multimodal responses in ways that Google tools do not. But Padlet's free tier has become increasingly restrictive - limited boards, limited posts - and I refuse to build my instructional practice on a foundation that could disappear behind a paywall at any time. Google Jamboard handles most of what I used Padlet for, and while it is less elegant, it is fully integrated with the ecosystem my students already inhabit and it will remain free.

Nearpod. Nearpod was essential during remote teaching. Its interactive lesson format - embedded questions, polls, simulations, and virtual field trips - kept students engaged when they were learning through a screen for six hours a day. In a physical classroom, most of what Nearpod does can be accomplished through a combination of Google Slides, Google Forms, and direct instruction. The interactive overlays that justified the tool's existence during remote learning add a layer of complexity that in-person teaching does not require.

Flipgrid. Student video responses were valuable during remote learning as a way to maintain social presence and practice speaking skills. In person, I can accomplish the same objectives more effectively through classroom discussion, presentations, and Socratic seminars. The overhead of recording, uploading, and reviewing video responses is not justified when students are sitting in front of me.

What I Am Piloting

Canva for Education. After exploring Canva this summer, I am cautiously piloting it for one specific use case: student-created infographics as an alternative to traditional poster projects. The design templates lower the barrier to entry for visual communication, and the education tier is genuinely free without the restrictive limitations that pushed me away from Padlet. I am giving it one semester. If it proves its value, it earns a permanent place. If not, Google Slides can handle the work.

The Underlying Principle

Every decision above is governed by a single principle: the best tool is the one that produces the strongest student learning outcomes with the least institutional friction. "Institutional friction" includes cognitive load on students who must learn another interface, time cost for me to create and manage content, equity concerns about access and functionality across devices, and dependency risk when free tools change their pricing models.

This principle is not anti-technology. It is anti-clutter. It recognizes that every tool in a teacher's ecosystem has a cost - in attention, in time, in cognitive bandwidth - and that those costs compound in ways that are easy to ignore and difficult to reverse.

A Note on What Is Coming

I spent part of my summer reading about artificial intelligence tools that are beginning to enter the education conversation. I do not have enough understanding yet to write about them with the depth they deserve, but I want to acknowledge that the landscape is shifting. Tools that can generate text, create images, and adapt to individual learners are moving from research labs into consumer products at a pace that has caught many educators off guard.

I am watching. I am reading. I am not yet acting. But I suspect that by this time next year, the conversation about which tools to keep and which to drop will include a category of technology that most of us have not yet reckoned with.

For now, though, the goal is simpler: start this school year with a clean, intentional, evidence-informed toolkit and the professional expertise to use it well. That is enough. That is more than enough.

Dr. Janette Camacho is a veteran K-12 educator with 28+ years of classroom experience, an Apple Teacher, and a newly certified Google Certified Educator Level 1. She writes about the intersection of pedagogy and technology at iTeachAI.